Chapter Twenty-Four

“Together, we will make America strong again. We will make America wealthy again. We will make America proud again. We will make America safe again. And yes, together, we will make America great again. Thank you. God bless you. And God bless America.” Donald Trump

Gideon couldn’t decide whether Kate believed this, or whether it was part of some elaborate scam.

She looked perfectly serious. And nervous.

“Just a second,” she said. “I want to check for calls.”

She was typing into the keyboard. The system beeped. Kate pressed a key, read something on the screen to the left, and went totally still.

“What is it?” he asked.

“It’s a call from Stella. Oh my God, she must have made it just before the accident.” She pressed another key, and the call started playing. They heard Stella’s voice, speaking quickly as though she was about to run out of time.

“Kate. I’m sorry, sweetheart, but I don’t think I’m going to see you again. There’s something you need to do for me. There’s a file on the computer in my office. It was loaded at 4:15 today. My system is set up to give you access. You need to copy the file onto a drive and hand it over to Gideon Frome. It’s encrypted; the code is 65879241. Tell him it’s from his brother. If they need to meet, you’ll find the time and coordinates in the file and the necessary travel passes for Gideon to get to the meeting place. Don’t tell anyone else about this. No one. I love you.”

The words flowed through his mind but didn’t make sense. There was a file? From his brother? A way to meet with Aaron? Had Stella been in contact with Aaron all this time? Had she been working with him? He hadn’t even known that Aaron was alive.

Kate’s hands were clasped in her lap as she stared straight ahead. “Oh God. If only I’d gotten this, maybe I could have helped her, done something. She must have known she was going to die.”

He shook his head, trying to get his brain to function. “What time was it made?” When she didn’t move, he got up and crossed to her. He squeezed her shoulder. “Come on, Kate. What time was the call made?”

She pressed a key. “Eleven minutes past seven.”

“Then you couldn’t have helped. The accident was logged at twelve minutes past. No way could you have stopped it. She knew that.” He leaned past her, pressed the replay button, and listened to the call again. Then a third time.

“Do you know what she’s talking about? What’s on this file?”

“No.”

“Did you know she was in contact with Aaron?”

“No. Of course not. Honest, Gideon. I’ve heard nothing from Aaron since he vanished.”

“But your sister obviously has.”

She frowned. “It doesn’t make sense. Was she working with the rebels? Is that why she was killed? Why not just arrest her? Why make it look like an accident?”

Ten years ago, Stella had been ambitious. He would have sworn she was loyal to the Party. Could she have been working with the rebels all along? For what purpose? And what was in the file?

Kate was supposed to give it to him. Why?

There was only one way to find out. They had to get the file. However, that would not be straightforward. There was a good chance that, if the Secret Service had suspected Stella of anything, her office would have been sealed off, her systems monitored.

While he might get in, he wouldn’t be able to extract the file. Not without Kate. He presumed it would require fingerprints and/or retinal scans. Which meant she had to go with him.

She wouldn’t get past security. Not without a really good reason.

“I have to tell you the rest,” Kate said, pulling him from his thoughts.

“The rest?”

“I don’t know what the file is, or why Stella has it. I don’t know anything. That has nothing to do with the reason I drugged you. You have to listen, Gideon. It’s important.”

He took a deep breath and cleared his mind, then sat down in his chair and tried to get his head back into what they’d been discussing before the call. Predicting the future. “Go on.”

“I developed Auspex from a system I found on the university servers. It was a project Oliver—my boss—had been working on before the research was made illegal.” She took a deep breath. “That was about eight years ago. I’d made progress with him, but when I came to work here, I had access to the government servers, and I integrated Auspex into the government surveillance systems. That was when the exciting stuff started to happen. Though, until recently, he didn’t do anything useful.”

“He?”

“Auspex.” She gave a shrug. “I’ve always thought of him as a “he”. Anyway, he didn’t really function until about a month ago.”

He frowned. “What happened?”

Kate gave him a shaky smile. “He started giving me predictions on the alerts I send on to NTAC. Usually they were a negligible chance of a threat. I thought he was functioning correctly, but when I compared the results to NTAC’s, they were completely different. I ran a debugging program and that changed something. Up until then, I hadn’t been able to read the chatter—it was all encrypted. After that I could read it. But most of it didn’t make sense.”

“So what changed? Why seek me out?” What she’d told him so far wasn’t enough to risk drugging a Secret Service agent, although it was likely enough to get her locked away for life. If not worse.

“I got a yellow alert—that’s a threat of terrorist activity. Auspex gave a probability of 68 percent that it would result in harm to the American people. That was the first time he’d given anything like that—usually he predicted a negligible risk. So I looked at the info dump and I found multiple references to some sort of nuclear attack. Not only that, but I found a reference to Stella.”

“That she was tied into some sort of nuclear attack on America?” He wouldn’t believe it. He couldn’t be that wrong about her.

“It was inconclusive.” She bit her lip and looked away. “I deleted the line related to her and sent the alert to NTAC as usual.”

Definitely locked away for life. Or executed for treason. But he could understand why she had done it. “Continue.”

She took a deep breath. “I couldn’t get hold of Stella. No one knew where she was. I thought maybe she’d already been picked up by the Secret Service. But there’s more.”

A sliver of dread wound through him. How the hell could there be more?

“I got the report from NTAC,” she continued. “It said the probability of the alert being a threat was negligible. Which didn’t make sense. I’d seen the info dumps. The references were there. I ran the alert through Auspex again. This time there was a 79 percent chance. It was going up.”

“You believed it?”

She gave a brief smile at his obviously incredulous tone. “I was skeptical as well, but I’ve done all the tests. I asked the same question in all sorts of different ways, and in the end, I couldn’t not believe it.”

She appeared so earnest. Did she really believe this? Did he?

Hell no.

“You don’t believe me, do you?”

“Let’s just presume I do for the moment. What happened next?”

“I’d spoken to Oliver. He’s my boss, my old professor. I think he suspects what I’m working on. He said I needed to get more specific. So I asked Auspex to prepare predictions on a time basis. It’s going to happen in less than two weeks. And I don’t know what to do. I needed more information.”

“So you drugged me?”

“Yes. And took a retinal scan.”

He glanced around the room as if some eavesdropper might suddenly pop up from out of nowhere. This was sufficient to get her executed as a traitor.

She must have sensed his unease. “Auspex checked—the room is clear. No one can hear us. Which means it’s up to you to report me if you feel you have to.”

He turned his attention back to the screen, which was now blank. Could the rebels have actually taken control of the Homeland Security systems? Maybe whatever Kate had been using them for had left them vulnerable to attack and what she thought were predictions was actually false information being fed to her for… He couldn’t come up with a reason. “Did you find the answers you were looking for?”

She shook her head. “Well, there was nothing about Stella being taken, but that hardly matters now. There was also nothing on the nuclear threat, which doesn’t make sense. Unless there’s a part of the server you don’t have access to.”

He could believe that. Boyd had almost admitted as much. He’d also implied that he’d only get access once he passed his probationary period and that, if it was up to Boyd, that wouldn’t be for a long time. “The Inner Circle,” he said.

Her eyes widened. “So there is such a thing?”

A group that bypassed the controls. Made their own rules. Killed anyone who stood in their way. “I’ve heard rumors.”

“Auspex is searching for a way in, but so far he’s found nothing. Time is running out. I thought about sending an anonymous tip to somebody, but if they don’t believe the alerts, why would they believe an anonymous tip? Then I thought maybe I could contact the rebels—warn them that if it’s something they’re planning, then…” She gave a helpless shrug.

“Let me get this straight. Your machine tells you the world is going to descend into nuclear war, and so you decide to introduce yourself to the nearest rebels and ask them nicely not to detonate their nuclear bomb?” He got to his feet and ran a hand through his hair, paced the room a couple of times. He came to a halt in front of her, hands on his hips. “Are you goddamn crazy?”

She stared up at him. “Maybe? I wish I didn’t believe it, but I do. So what am I supposed to do, just sit and wait for us all to go up in smoke? Just hear me out. I know it’s a lot to take in. Afterward, I’ll see if I can get the proof to persuade you that Auspex is right.”

He felt too restless to sit. Instead he leaned against the wall, arms folded across his chest. “Go on.”

“Even with your access to the Secret Service files, we can’t work out a way—”

“We?” he interrupted. Was she working with someone else?

“Me and Auspex.” She waved a hand at the computer screen. She talked about the damn thing as if it could think for itself. Though wasn’t that what artificial intelligence did? “As I was saying, we can’t find a way to contact the rebels. I know they’re in New York, but nothing more.”

“You could always go and stand in the middle of Times Square and shout ‘Is anybody here planning to blow up a nuclear bomb?’” He sank into the seat behind him.

She gritted her teeth and glared at him. “Don’t be an asshole. I’ve been living with this hanging over me. Living, breathing, sleeping. Now Stella’s dead, and I don’t know why.” She caught her lower lip between her teeth. “I keep thinking that maybe she was a rebel all along, and if only she’d spoken to me, trusted me, instead of trying to protect me, then maybe I wouldn’t have had to involve you.”

No, maybe she would have his brother, Aaron, instead. Who’d run off to play with the rebels and turned everybody’s worlds upside down.

“And maybe, somehow, she’d still be alive,” Kate continued. “Which means it’s my fault. So guess what? Right now, I’m not feeling a whole lot like joking.”

No. He could see she was deadly serious. Gideon got up again, suddenly restless. “I need some fresh air, and you need to come with me.”

“Why?” She huffed. “I have things to do.”

“Look, from now on, until I decide just what I believe and don’t believe, I’m not letting you out of my sight. God knows what you might get up to. I could turn my back and the next minute you’d be heading off for the nearest rebel camp. Then it’s likely that you’d be dead.”

“Would it matter? If I was dead?”

“Strangely, yes. God knows why. The last thing I need in my life is a crazy woman.”

She scowled at him. “Thanks. Except I’m not in your life. I drugged you to get the access. Now we’re finished. You can just walk away.”

He shook his head. “As I said—crazy. If you do anything, you’ll be killed or captured. There will be an investigation. They’ll find out you used my access, and there’s the end of my brand-new start. My future. Whether I like this or not, I’m in it up to my neck.”

“You could still turn me in.”

“Too late for that. Besides, you’re forgetting that there’s more at stake than your predictions. What’s on this file of Stella’s? Why give it to me?”

She lifted her chin. “Desperation, probably.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly. “We have to get it before anyone else does. That means working together.” Suddenly he felt like the room was pressing in on him. The windowless place reminded him too much of the interrogation room where they had questioned him after Aaron had disappeared. He’d told them he hadn’t known anything. They’d tortured him anyway. Broken him down, stripped away everything he believed in. He’d thought he’d built himself up again, but really, he hadn’t. He was just a whole mass of contradictions, doubts, and fears, loosely cobbled together.

And at the bottom, maybe hope that there could still be a better world, a free world, out there somewhere.

But right now, he just needed to get out of there.

“Come on. Let’s go for a walk. I need to get my head straight, and then you can bring me back here and prove to me that you’ve made a machine that can predict the future.”

She appeared about to argue, but she must have seen something in his face, because she leaned across, switched off the systems, and stood up. “I’m hungry. I suppose it’s weird in the middle of all this—feeling hungry, I mean. As if my appetite has no right to exist when the world is falling apart around me.”

He exhaled, still in the grip of his need to get out, feeling as though the weight of the building might collapse on them at any moment. He took her arm and ushered her out of the office and into the corridor, then up the stairwell that opened into the reception area.

They passed through security and then out onto the street. He gulped in the air.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah. I can just get a little claustrophobic underground.”

“Is that from when you were in the army?”

For a moment, he thought about just saying yes and leaving the subject, but in the end, he wanted there to be truth between them. “No. I was interrogated ten years ago, after Aaron disappeared. They wanted to find out if I knew anything.”

“They tortured you?”

“It wasn’t pleasant.”

“Your father…? Do you think that’s why he killed himself?”

She was always so direct. Didn’t shy away from asking questions most people would avoid. “Maybe. Or perhaps he couldn’t take the shame. His position meant everything to him.”

“Yes. I keep thinking about my family. What will happen to them—what’s left of them—if I go through with this.”

“Don’t. In fact, for the next hour don’t think about anything. A walk, then some breakfast. Then we’ll…Christ knows. Decide what to do next, I suppose.”

The sun shone, the sky was cloudless, the city around them went on, people working, children going to school. They strolled along the quiet streets in silence, walking close together. After a few minutes, he slipped his hand into hers, almost as if they were lovers. He told himself he was just keeping a close watch on her, but the truth was that touching her made him feel grounded. Which was odd, because she was crazy and deluded and plotting treason. She believed she had made a machine that could think and tell the future.

They found a café with tables on the street. Reluctantly he released her hand and they sat down, ordered coffee and bagels with cream cheese. It all seemed so normal. He realized he was starving and ate the first lot without speaking, then called over the waiter and ordered seconds. Finally, they both sat back replete, sipping their coffee in the sun.

“America’s not such a bad place, is it?” She waved her hand around the street, the café.

“How do we know? There’s no way of telling what’s going on beyond our own little bit of the country. The news feeds are all controlled by the administration. We only know what they tell us.”

“Like aliens being deported back to their own country.” She rested her chin on her hand and watched the passers-by. “The day of the president’s birthday—that was when this all began—I saw a family being taken away at the checkpoint. They looked so scared. I always believed they were just deported, flown to wherever they do belong and released. Not so bad.”

He’d once believed that as well.

“I asked Auspex later what would happen to them. He predicted they were dead already or being kept for spare parts. When did that happen? When did the American people agree to do that?”

“The American people haven’t had a say in much of anything since Martial Law came into force.”

She emptied her mug, placed it on the cheery checked tablecloth. “One of my jobs is to monitor for alerts and pass them on to the Secret Service. I’ve been deleting the code greens—the alien activity—ever since Auspex told me what the likely result would be. Someone is probably going to notice any day now. So I’m likely finished anyway.” She gave a weak smile. “Maybe I should run away and join the rebels. Except what’s the point if we’re all going to blow up?”

“Not much point at all.”

“This whole thing has gotten me thinking. We’ve been living our lives wearing blinkers. Kidding ourselves that what we don’t see isn’t happening. That we aren’t murdering innocent people just because they don’t have the right paperwork. I hate it.” Her voice was suddenly fierce. He glanced around, but there was no one listening.

“And you know what?” she continued. “Once I’d admitted to myself that I hate it, it was like a wall was knocked down in my mind. I realized that I hate this country and the way we live. I hate being told what I can and can’t do. I hate that we have no freedom. That I can’t go to the goddamn moon if I want to.”

“You think you could build a spaceship?”

“Auspex says there’s a 76 percent chance I could.”

He wished she hadn’t mentioned Auspex. “As long as the world doesn’t implode first.”

Her shoulders slumped. “Yes.”

“I suppose it comes down to what most people want. To be safe or to be free?”

“What do you want?”

He thought for a moment. Not about his answer, but about how much of himself he wanted to reveal to this woman. While he still didn’t entirely trust her, in the end, he went with the truth. “For me, it’s not really a choice anymore. I know that safety is an illusion. I grew up believing that I had a place in the world, that I was part of something bigger than me. And just like that it was gone, and I was on my own. Worse than on my own, because I knew that anyone I cared for could be gone just as easily as my brother and my father.”

She leaned toward him, her expression earnest, and placed her hand over his. He looked at it for a moment.

“So you decided not to care.”

“It wasn’t that difficult.” Though that wasn’t entirely true. In the army, he’d learned about camaraderie. Looking out for each other.

“Maybe you can only be free if you have nothing and no one to care about,” she said. “It’s a sort of freedom anyway. Though not like going to the moon.” She sighed. “I’d choose freedom.”

“Just as well, because you’ve pretty much fucked up any chance you have at safety.”

She grinned, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “Yeah. Tell me about the Wall.”

“What about it?”

“What’s it like? What’s on the outside? Did you get to meet any non-Americans? What were they like?”

“As most of them tended to be shooting at me, we never really got to know each other. But yes, I went over the other side. It was…bleak. The area has been mined for miles in every direction.”

“Who is it, though? Who are we fighting? What do they want?”

He didn’t know anymore. “I don’t know.”

“I had a dream the night I saw the family taken away at the checkpoint. They threw them out of this big black gate, and they choked on noxious gases.”

“They don’t send aliens out through the Wall.”

“No. They keep them here. At least their body parts, anyway.” Another sigh. “I suppose we should go back.”

“And you can tell me the future.”

They’d walked a long way around but headed back to her office by the most direct route. About halfway there, they hit a checkpoint. The Secret Service agent was redirecting people. Gideon pulled out his ID and flashed it. “What’s going on?” he asked.

“A rally at the bottom of K Street, sir. Possible rebel activity. A code two has been called. We’ve been told not to let any civilians through.”

The man didn’t comment as Gideon gestured to Kate to pass. This was the pro-democracy rally. They were usually peaceful. They just wanted a return to democracy, which everyone had been promised anyway.

As they approached the crossroads at 14th and K, the sound of running feet came from up ahead. Instinct kicked in, and Gideon stopped Kate with a hand on her arm. They were on a broad street lined with shops and offices. Just as they turned the corner, he heard the familiar hiss of a rocket flying through the air, and they came face to face with a mass of running people.

Were they under attack?

The rocket screeched over their heads, crashing into the street about a hundred feet from where they stood, just in front of the wave of people. It exploded in a cloud of gas, filling the air with black fumes like something out of a nightmare.

Another exploded, and another, until there was an almost solid wall of smoke. The people were stumbling now, coughing and choking, crashing to their knees.

Gideon dragged Kate back into a doorway as running feet sounded behind them. Wrapping his arms around her, he turned her so she was pressed against the wall between him and anything that was coming. Reaching behind her, he tried the door. It was locked. They were going nowhere.

D.C. had become a war zone and, for now, they were stuck in the middle of it.